The Cloud Foundry Blog

VMC Everywhere

When we launched Cloud Foundry, we wanted to change the rules of PaaS portability in the cloud . Until then using a PaaS meant being bound tightly to a single provider, often running only a single instance, tied directly the the availability and performance of a single cloud. One of the core tenants of the Cloud Foundry Open PaaS project is ‘multi-cloud’ the ability to run the system on the cloud or infrastructure of your choice, without affecting the developer experience or VMC client interface.

Today we are announcing collaborations with key industry partners, dramatically expanding the integrated tooling for running Cloud Foundry almost anywhere, and delivering on our portability vision.

Canonical: By most measures Ubuntu is one of the leading operating systems in the cloud, including being the core OS powering CloudFoundry.com. Now starting with the 11.10 release both the VMC Client, and VCAP server functionality will be available directly as Ubuntu packages created by Canonical. With over 20 million active desktop users and a strong IaaS server OS popularity it represents an important milestone for the open source distribution of Cloud Foundry, and is just the beginning of an ongoing collaboration with Canonical. Having the VMC client pre-installed and ready on millions of developer desktops makes a Cloud Foundry app deployment just a few commands away for anyone using Ubuntu. To read more about their plans for Cloud Foundry in their Cloud initiative read here.

Dell: Dell has pioneered an approach to automating the installation and configuration of open source cloud software onto bare metal hardware systems with a software framework called Crowbar. Working with Dell, we will be releasing a Crowbar barclamp that will install and configure Cloud Foundry, including multi-node configurations over time, leveraging the open source Crowbar framework. Crowbar can be used to install, maintain, expand, and architect the instance, including BIOS configuration, network discovery, status monitoring, performance data gathering, and alerting. This immediately gives enterprises and service providers, looking to pilot Cloud Foundry, a proven and popular bare metal installation solution. Find out more at Dell Crowbar team member blogs, and stay tuned for future project updates. Rob Hirschfeld’s Blog JBGeorge’s BlogBarton George’s Blog

enStratus: enStratus team has completed work to add Cloud Foundry to their service catalog, enabling Cloud Foundry to be deployed and managed on any of the 18 different clouds they support, as well as any vSphere or vCloud director environments. Both enStratus and Dell Crowbar consume the recently released Chef recipes, created by the Cloud Foundry engineering team for as standard installation scripts for the community. As the recipes are updated service catalog items within enStratus can be immediately upgraded to reflect the latest version. To find out more about the enterprise focused enStratus Cloud Foundry solution start here.

Opscode: In addition to releasing the Chef recipes we created for Cloud Foundry, we have also been working with Opscode, the creator of Chef ( an open-source systems integration framework built specifically for automating the cloud), to publish them on their community site and integrate into Opscode Hosted Chef (OHC) . This means that you will be able to configure and deploy Cloud Foundry to most environments with a single command. We are also working with Opscode to make it easier to build increasingly complex Cloud Foundry topologies on almost any infrastructure with Chef. Expect more information and updates soon.

Through these new open source based collaborations and integrations Cloud Foundry‘s VMC client will now be found pre-built on millions of developer and server operating systems, while Cloud Foundry server will be easily deployed from the top cloud management software products in the world onto any cloud.

These integrations build on our existing work with Rightscale who continues to support deploying Cloud Foundry on EC2.

The community installation and configuration scripts are now also available directly on github, allowing users to build their own deployment code around actively maintained configuration primitives.

We will be hosting a hack day with DTO solutions on September 8th at our campus for those wanting to get some hands on experience with them.